


misery business

by mellieforyellie



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Depression, F/F, F/M, M/M, Multi, References to Suicide, Suicidal Thoughts, Teen Angst, sex bracelets
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-11
Updated: 2013-07-10
Packaged: 2017-12-18 09:57:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/878520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mellieforyellie/pseuds/mellieforyellie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is the early 2000’s, and your school is currently being introduced to the fad of sex bracelets. You, on one hand, are completely ignorant of this fad. Your best friend, however, is anything but.</p>
            </blockquote>





	misery business

Life has always been fairly boring and monotonous at Sburb High, as you’ve discovered. Like, come on, two and (almost a) half years of this shit, and it’s all the same. There are no clique battles and “popular kids” to impress with half-assed, bass-ackwards ways of boasting about sex, drugs, and alcohol. Sure, everyone stuck to their respective group of friends, but there were no hierarchies and definitely no scandals. Everything was so fucking boring here, _God_ , why did you have to live in a small town?

The tiny town of Alternia held exactly 3,562 people, and most of them were old retired people who wanted to come live in the wooded paradise of southeastern Washington. Everybody who owned property pretty much had practically an acre or two of woods to themselves, not to mention all the private cabins both previous and current owners had built in the midst of the woods.

 _You_ are currently fucking around in one of your family’s private cabins, which you and your best friend, Dave, have commandeered as your personal bro fort. There’s a shitty movie that’s playing idly in the background, there for background noise rather than entertainment purposes. The noises one heard in the woods could make anyone go mad after a few hours— that is to say, nothing but bird calls and _criik_ -ing insects. The two of you are throwing around cards and calling “highs” and “lows” pretending you’re playing some cool Vegas card game, when in reality neither of you have any fucking idea what you’re doing. But its fun and somehow competitive and there’s nothing better for you guys to do anyway.

He calls a win for the fifth time, and you argue with him about it for the sake of a conversation, and when its all over the two of you are laughing and throwing cards at each other never to recover them all again.

In the process of picking up the cards you _can_ find, Dave mutters “shit” under his breath and picks up a broken white rubber bracelet. Now that you can think about it and look, he has a shitload of those stupid bracelets all over both of his arms. There must be like ten different colors and there was a couple of each color on each arm.

 “Dave, what the hell is with those bracelets?”

He raises an eyebrow at you over his shades, holding his broken white bracelet up. 

“John, are you telling me you’ve never heard of a sex bracelet?”

You give him a look that is both concerned and confused at the same time, clearly conveying a message of “Uh, no.”

“Oh, John, my sweet virgin-minded friend,” he says, wrapping an arm around your shoulder, paying no attention to the slap you aim at his stomach, “these are _sex bracelets_.”

“Sex bracelets?”

Dave was into some weird shit, but this might be the weirdest you’ve encountered yet.

Well, besides that puppet thing. That was just fucking weird.

“Yep. Each color stands for a different sex act, and if someone snaps them off, you have to do it for them.” He says all this nonchalantly, like this was some skewered kiddy game that everyone was playing just to fuck around and waste time in this pointless nowhere town. He holds up the white bracelet again. “This one, for example, is to signify my willingness to have a consensual mouth assault, with tongues.”

“Isn’t that a little…extreme?” you ask. 

He shrugs. “It’s fun sometimes, depending on the person who snaps it. And hey, it’s a way to get laid without all the awkward foreplay ‘dating’ shit.” He smirks. “Especially with people I would rather just fool around with.”

You think that this isn’t quite right, and it gives you a gut-wrenching twist to think that Dave could be playing tonsil hockey with random people who snapped a bracelet. And, looking from the amount and variety of colors on his wrists, he was probably doing a lot more than just that.

Dave looks at you over his shades, which have slid down to his nose. “Wanna put some on?”

A whole new wave of nausea washes over you when you think about _you_ doing things like that.

You laugh nervously and shake your head. “Nah man, I’m not into that. Not my style.”

“The whole school’s doing it, dude,” he says, shrugging nonchalantly, before he grins at you. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you started wearing them in a week.”

You scoff. “As if!”

“In fact, I bet on it. Ten bucks that you, John Egbert, will be wearing sex bracelets within the week.” 

You laugh and shove him off the couch, but inside your head you assure yourself that something like that will _never_ happen. Your dad raised you better!

Not to say, of course, there was anything wrong with what they were doing. You guess. Just, you didn’t want to do shit like that with just anybody. If they wanted to, that was their business and it wasn’t your place to tell them what was right or wrong. But…wow, that just seemed really wrong to you.

It wasn’t like you were a total goody two shoes when it came to sex stuff, though. You had made out with your fair share of people, but all of them you had liked at least a little bit in the romantic sense. None of it was entirely meaningless, although there had definitely been some mistakes. You jacked off regularly like any teenage boy did, but _that_ was no surprise. But you had never really gotten any farther than some awkward encounters with tongues in your mouth, and you didn’t really plan to  go farther unless it was with someone you were dating.

Eventually, the laughter died down between the two of you long enough for the both of you to exhale a large breath at the same time, and to realize that the movie was over, the VCR tape long having run its course. The two of you sit in silence, and for once, you can’t really read the mood. Is it relaxed or severely uncomfortable? It could go either way, but you don’t really want to look at him to figure it out.

“You don’t think of me differently for doing this shit, do you, John?”

“No, Dave! Of course not! You’re being stupid again.”

Ok, that was a teensy bit of a lie. You didn’t think different of him, not too much. But it was a little weird. And now you would be thinking all the time of what he was doing when he wasn’t with you, when he was at those lame-ass parties the kids with the lakeside cabins always threw. Was he doing things with somebody? Getting blowjobs, maybe even giving some?

“Cool.”

There’s a beat or two of awkward silence, before you clear your throat and get yourself off the couch.

“It’s fifteen until seven,” you say. “Dinner soon. You staying today?”

Dave sighs and gets up, too, already walking towards the door. “Hmm, I wonder which I would rather have,” he questions sarcastically, “one of your dad’s amazing home-cooked meals or stale Chinese take-out? The choice is heart-wrenching!”

He poses dramatically against the door with an arm over his face, and you laugh and shove him out of the way.

“Dork!” you laugh, as the two of you begin to trudge through the forest back to the house, a good twenty-five minute walk.

You think the area is beautiful, and even though it’s so _painfully_ boring here, at least the scenery is absolutely gorgeous. The trees are green practically seven months out of the year; they take a month to fall off and grow back, and are only bare during the snowy months.  You love the smell of the crisp, earthy outdoors while you walk, and _wow_ , you would be out of shape if you didn’t walk this circuit practically every day. The weather itself is gorgeous, even if it tends to rain often, because for the most part you like the rain, from the way it smells to the sound it makes on the roof. It’s a dick to walk in the muddy soil to get to you and Dave’s bro fort, but you can and will continue to manage.

“So what do the other colors stand for?” you ask, genuinely curious. You think you should get to know what _exactly_ your best friend is doing with this kind of stuff.

“Well…” 

Dave spends the rest of the walk telling you what each of the colors mean, including the ones he’s not wearing. There were fifteen, you think, maybe a little more or less, you don’t really remember, and there was some _weird_ shit some of them allowed for. Like, the ass licking stuff? Gross!

He wasn’t wearing a bracelet for that, which was slightly reassuring.

He was however, wearing a bracelet for blowjobs (whether he gave or received them was not explained to you despite your questioning), hugs, lap dances, kisses, and French kisses.

“Why lap dances?” you ask, as he’s naming off the bracelets, pointing to the red one.

He chuckles. “I look damn good in some red heels, if you know what I mean, man.”

You don’t really know what he means, but then again, you don’t really want to. So you laugh and let him continue his listing, obviously stoked to get to school you on this sex bracelet crap. He was such a dork sometimes, _especially_ with his “cool kid” façade that all of you let him pretend to keep up. Of course, it wasn’t like anybody bought it, except for maybe the girls he’s been fooling around with.

Well, probably girls. You weren’t quite sure what way Dave swung, and it wasn’t like it mattered either way. You didn’t ask, and you were perfectly fine to be kept in the dark about it.

It’s not like it was any of your business, anyway.

* * *

 

**\-- ectoBiologist [EB] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] \--**

EB: rose!!  
  
TT: I can see that you have obviously been vying just for me to get on.  
  
EB: i have!! i’ve been waiting for foreverrrrr.

TT: Of course you have.

TT: Even though I’m the one who’s been on for hours and you have only just signed on.

EB: :/

TT: Oh, no. Go ahead, I’m listening.

Rose seemed to be acting weird, and a little bit mean. But you ignore her strange behavior and opt to ask her what you logged on to ask her instead.

EB: ok, have you heard about that weird bracelet thing?

TT: Sex bracelets?

EB: how did you figure it out just from that? that was like THE most vague description i could give!

TT: John, what other kind of bracelet thing could there be?

EB: pfft, i dunno. there’s already the sex bracelet stuff and that’s weird as hell, so i wouldn’t put it past society to make up some other weird thing.

TT: You’re being stupid again.

EB: shut up!

EB: :P

EB: how did you find out about the sex bracelet thing though?

TT: How could I not?

TT: It was on the news one night about the newest “teen fad” and the next day everybody in school was talking about it.

TT: Literally, everybody.

TT: You have to have been deaf, dumb and blind not to hear about it.

EB: oh…

TT: When did you find out about it?

EB: today, hehehe

TT: JUST today?

EB: yep.

EB: we already knew about the blind part, but i never knew i was deaf and dumb, too!

TT: It’s a shocking plot twist.

TT: John Egbert, the latest Helen Keller.

TT: You’ll be on all the papers.

EB: i’ll be a star!

EB: hehehe

EB: but anyway, dave told me all about it.

TT: Oh, God.

EB: what?

TT: He has too many of those awful things on him.

TT: It’s like a bright neon sign saying, “I’m a big douchebag, sleep with me for no reason other than some big pointless game meant to push the societal boundaries and induce unprotected teen sex.”

EB: uh, rose?

TT: Sorry.

EB: is this why you seem really pissed off?

TT: To be determined.

EB: rose.

TT: I’m pissed off for the sake of Jade.

EB: jade? why?

TT: John, you know she likes him.

EB: no! what!

EB: since when has she liked him?

TT: Since elementary school!

TT: Jesus, John.

EB: how was i supposed to know?

EB: you guys have your girl talk and dave and i have brotime.

EB: jade never talks to me about that kind of stuff.

TT: Yet all three of you talk to me about it exclusively?

EB: duh!

EB: you are the tentacleTHERAPIST, after all.

TT: Pfft.

EB: wait, dave talks to you about that stuff?

TT: All I’ve heard about for the last week when this stupid thing started is all the girl’s he’s copulated with and all the dicks he’s sucked.

EB: ok, tmi wow.

TT: Yeah? He’s my cousin.

TT: You’re his best friend, you should be hearing about this shit.

TT: Isn’t it a “guy thing” to talk about all the girls you want to bone?

EB: your stereotypical idea of bro time hurts me, rose. deeply and emotionally.

TT: Well, Jade and I talk about all the hot people we’d do.

EB: ok gross ewwwww.

TT: You are such a pansy.

EB: i am NOT.

EB: i just do not like to hear about the two girls i consider my SISTERS talk about having dicks put in them.

TT: You already have a sister.

EB: that is irrelevant.

EB: but i also do not want to hear about her sexscapades either.

EB: i don’t really want to hear about ANYONE’S sexscapades, for that matter.

TT: I think I never want to hear you use the word “sexscapade” ever again.

EB: deal.

TT: Now John, as much as I would love to continue talking to you, I have a terribly long history paper to write.

EB: …you mean the one due tomorrow?

TT: Exactly that one.

EB: rose!

TT: What?

EB: it’s almost ten at night and you’re not finished with it?

TT: I haven’t even started.

EB: ROSE.

TT: I’ll get it done, calm down.

TT: Who are you, my mother?

EB: no! gosh.

TT: That’s right, my mother has no clue what I do in my free time and usually passes out before she has a chance to yell at me to go to sleep.

TT: You’re nothing like my mother.

EB: rose, are you ok?

TT: I’m fine.

EB: somehow, i don’t believe that.

TT: Too bad.

TT: I guess you’d better.

EB: rose, you’re making me worried.

EB: :(

TT: Sorry.

EB: no, don’t be sorry!

TT: I have to go.

EB: wait! 

**\-- tentacleTherapist [TT] is now offline! --**

EB: dammit.

**\-- ectoBiologist [EB] has ceased pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] \--**

You sigh and lean back in your chair, ignoring the squeaking it makes in protest. You run a hand through your hair, frustrated. You always fucked shit like this up  — you’ve never been any good at comforting people, and you guess you just weren’t the friend that everybody trusted with stuff like this.

You were kind of hurt, actually, that Dave didn’t tell you about that stuff. I mean, yeah, you didn’t particularly want to hear it, but it should have been an automatic thing. Bros tell bros that kind of stuff, don’t they?

But you were kind of worthless as a bro and as a regular human being. You kind of fucking hated yourself, especially in moments like this.

You didn’t tell anybody that though. Why would you tell somebody that? It seemed like an attention hungry thing and you didn’t want to be like that. And it wasn’t like any of this was serious enough for you to go to somebody like a therapist — that was just silly!

It’s not like you mattered much anyway, so you were content to keep this all to yourself. You wouldn’t be a bother to anyone.  

**Author's Note:**

> this was an experiment on my part to explore teen sexuality, and what a better and interesting enabler than the brief 2000's fad of sex bracelets? unfortunately you won't really get to see the use of the bracelets until chapter 3. 
> 
> next up is rose, and while she doesn't really have a part in the bracelets portion of this (as you can see why), she has her own storyline. 
> 
> until next time!


End file.
